Why I'm Posting Again

Here I am, posting again. Time to get some of the stories I've told a hundred times out loud finally down in writing.

It started in 1994, writing newsletters for the tech community. Then two books on word of mouth marketing. Then a blog, Deckermarketing.com, started while I was at Dell in 2003. By the time I was CMO at Bazaarvoice, I'd kept the same habit going inside the job: over 250 blog posts, 50-plus articles, more than 100 events spoken at, a Twitter following that crossed 18,000. None of it felt like a campaign. It felt like Tuesday.

Here's what I didn't understand until years later: none of those individual posts or talks did the work. The compounding did.

One post rarely changes anything. Two hundred and fifty do, not because any single one goes viral, but because by the time someone Googles you, hears you speak, or asks a colleague if you're worth calling, there's three decades of reps sitting there answering for you before you ever say a word.

I used to think of it as a campaign too: a push before a launch, then quiet. Took me a long time to see that's not what compounds. Compounding needs the boring middle, the year eleven nobody's watching, not just the loud year one.

I've stopped calling it thought leadership. I just think of it as compound interest, paid in reps.

What's the version of your blog you stopped writing in year two, right before it would've started paying you back?